A Close Encounter with Murphy’s Law

For those of you who don’t have an up-close-and-personal relationship with Murphy’s Law, here it is: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and it will happen to me. That’s what I’ve been dealing with this week–Murphy’s Law and a series of unintended and unfortunate consequences.

When my publisher first suggested putting out a free download promotional copy of Hour of the Hunter, I thought it was a GREAT idea. HOTH, as we call it in my family, is a big favorite of mine, and one of my books that has consistently been under-read (if that’s a real word) by my fans. The first problem with the "free" edition was that it had to be a "new" edition–one that was a remanufactured copy of an earlier edition. To do that the publisher used a program that did OCR (optical character recognition) that, as it turns out, didn’t recognize a lot of my characters. The resulting edition was full of OCR-generated typos.

While I was floating down the Rhone River in blissful ignorance, frustrated readers began letting me and my agent know about the problem. And it was a BIG problem because 50,000!!!! people downloaded that error-ridden copy. (That’s 35,000 more copies that were put out in the first paltry 15,000 hardback printing of that book back in 1990!)

By the time I came home from France and headed to Ashland, the situation and the complaints were coming to a head. One reviewer on Amazon allowed as how it wasn’t a problem I necessarily caused, but she held all our feet, mine and the people in NY, to the fire for putting out what was ultimately a dissatisfying read. (Rightfully so, I might add.)

Some people are under the impression that writers zip off a manuscript, send it to the publisher, and then sit back and wait for the money to fall on their heads. Maybe that’s true sometimes, but usually not–not out here in the real world.

In this case, we had the potential of 50,000 UNHAPPY customers out there–in the real world! And the book they were unhappy about had MY name on it!

So I talked to my editor at HarperCollins. Eventually, there was an agreement that they would correct the free download edition and make it available again. They sent me a note last week saying that it would be available this week–September 20-27–and my ITG (Translation: IT Gal) and I dutifully sent out an e-mail blast to my new book (In this case old book!) notification list. We sent it out on Friday before the starting date on Monday in hopes of giving people a heads-up. Over the weekend, several people wrote to me complaining that they tried to take advantage of the offer. I wrote back and told them they were a day early–that if they ordered on Monday morning, they’d be fine.

But remember Murphy’s Law? It turned out that on Monday things weren’t fine–not at ALL!!! There was no "free" copy. The download copies still cost $8.99. And so I spent most of the day on the phone and on line with New York trying to get to the bottom of what had happened. It took until this morning before all the broken pieces finally fell into place. The download links are now working, are on the “Welcome’ page of my website, in case some readers of this blog who aren’t necessarily in my list tried the download adventure unsuccessfully and are willing to try again.

The free offer has now been extended to September 28, so time is off the essence. This has been a huge effort on the part of lots of people to make good on something that was and is free–something that isn’t going to generate any royalties for me or sales for my publisher. I’m incredibly grateful to HarperCollins for the effort they put into turning this around and making it right. An especial by-name thank you goes to Shawn Nicholls the e-commerce guy at HarperCollins.

Because of time constraints on the above offer, I’m updating the blog on Wednesday rather than the usual Friday. In other words, on Saturday morning when you pour your coffee and think you’ll be able to read a NEW blog update, it probably won’t be there, so don’t go sending me a griping e-mail about it. (Yes, Phil, I’m talking about you!!)

And now having spent a week working on writing for free (this blog included) it’s time to go to work writing for pay. After all, if I just sit here long enough some money is bound to fall on my head. Right?